Psychologist: Hard to identify mass murderers beforehand

Ken Dixon

Published 11:06 pm, Wednesday, February 13, 2013

HARTFORD -- It's nearly impossible to identify potential mass murderers such as Adam Lanza before they fulfill their violent fantasies.

That's the opinion of a forensic psychologist who Wednesday told state lawmakers planning the legislative reaction to the Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings that they should consider replacing hollow-core classroom doors with solid wood and bulletproof glass.

For as little as $50 a year, anonymous tip lines can be made available with the information reviewed by risk assessment teams.

S. David Bernstein, a Norwalk-based psychologist, said 95 percent of school shooters attend the facilities they attack and 75 percent hold longtime grudges for having been bullied.

Bernstein, who has investigated gruesome murders in academic settings, called the Sandy Hook attack an example of "the Black Swan" effect, a rare mass murder. The average school crime falls far short of that.

"It's impossible to predict," Bernstein told a subcommittee on school safety. "It is very possible to prepare for, and that's the best we can hope."

Lanza, 20, attended the elementary school as a child, but few clues to his possible motive have been released during the active investigation following the Dec. 14 attack that left 20 children and six adults dead.

Bernstein said many people who become violent had bullying issues since a young age and grow retaliatory fantasies as they get older. "Our goal is to intervene somewhere along that continuum," Bernstein said.

He said as much as 80 percent of the time there is "leakage" in advance of an incident, with word getting out to one or more people.

He said that every dollar invested in prevention potentially saves thousands of dollars in intervention costs. Profiling potential shooters doesn't make sense, since the average assailant is white and between the ages of 11 and 23, he said.

"That's a pretty big net, right?" Bernstein said, adding that armed school resource officers and social workers are in some of the best positions to see which children are troubled.

He said so-called zero-tolerance policies have failed as a deterrent to crime in schools. Under those rules, people who could have described threatening behavior balk because of the possible repercussions of having a student kicked out of school.

Centralizing reporting and review would make sure potential warning signs aren't missed, particularly in cases of children who have been bullied. The goal is to locate the 1 percent of disturbed people who could become a threat to public safety.

"People have some data, but nobody puts that data together collectively," he said, noting that in the Virginia Tech shooting of April 2007, in which 32 died, "no one was connecting the dots" on the shooter's feelings and plans, although "there was a clear warning."